Geeky Signs of the Apocalypse

byGreat White Snark| updated onNovember 18, 2007

Wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly when the apocalypse is coming? For one, you’d be able to cancel those final, sweaty spin classes you were dreading… ’cause no one cares if your ass is fat when you’re burning in the hellfires of eternal damnation. Right, sinner?

If only you knew what signs to look for. Your run-of-the-mill street corner bible-thumper will tell you to watch out for cats laying with dogs. Toads pouring from the sky. Plagues of locusts. Bill Maher making babies with Ann Coulter.

Sorry, make that… anyone making babies with Ann Coulter. (Shudder.)

As a member in good standing of the Holy Roman Church of Red Delicious Twizzlers, however, I know that you have to be on the lookout for apocalyptic signs everywhere… including the four corners of the geek domain.

And after what I’ve seen this past week… I’m considering selling all my belongings on Craigslist and churning through what’s left of my cash on piles of hookers and blow in a suite at the Palms in Vegas.

Wait… what? Sony’s and Microsoft’s respective games divisions aren’t supposed to make money, people. It’s, like, a rule. They’re supposed to compete in a ugly cycle of one-upmanship that involves ridiculously high R&D and hardware costs that are in no notable way subsidized by console and game sales. In a perfect world, the marketing and engineering ninjas at Nintendo should be laughing all the way to the bank while the two tech titans bloody themselves in the dirt.

I guess this jarring news should have prepared me for the whathefuh? that was the news of an impending Hell’s Kitchen video game.

Yes, thatHell’s Kitchen. Soon chef Gordon Ramsay will be berating your culinary creations… in a video game. I mean, what better setting for trying to cook a gourmet meal and then being told it “tastes like baby vomit” than in your living room, on the sofa? R-i-i-i-i-ight. I haven’t had that much fun since I ran out of things to read in the waiting room of my doctor’s office.

Look for the skies to turn purple and oceans to boil once Paris Hilton announces her Drink and Drive Like a Hilton video game, a la Grand Theft Auto. Mark my words.

Seriously, people? The first Saw didn’t give you your fill? You were like, “Hey, this torture porn thing seems kind of nifty. Let’s go back for more, once or three times.”

Good thing the world will be over before Saw V hits next year.

TV

What’s wrong with this picture? CBS has ordered more scripts for its definitively craptacular vampire-detective Friday-night show Moonlight (38 out of 100 on Metacritic), and Moonlight actually has better viewership than NBC’s highly-touted and heavily-promoted Chuck. Meanwhile, one of the most anticipated geek properties of the new season, Bionic Woman, is slowly but surely languishing into obscurity.

Final nail in this coffin? Cavemen gets renewed for a second season, and Pushing Daisies gets canceled. It’s oh-so-possible, people. When it happens, remember to stop, drop, and roll.

UPDATE: Last week’s numbers are in, and Moonlight actually had an uptick in veiwership and beat both Chuck and Bionic Woman. (For that matter, it also beat non-genre show and critical darling Friday Night Lights in its own timeslot.) Oh, lamentation.

COMIC BOOKS

Since before the half-Jewish zygote of me was formed, Spider-Man has had many simultaneously-running titles (or, books) at Marvel. There’s the original, Amazing Spider-Man. Over the years, there’s also been Marvel Team-Up, Friendly-Neighborhood Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, Spider-Man, Sensational Spider-Man and several other titles I can’t recollect. As with the X-Men, Marvel hasn’t been afraid to put an industrial-strength milking machine on the teat of one of its most popular character franchises.

So color me beffudlewildered when I found out that Marvel is putting the kibosh on all but the flagship title,Amazing Spider-Man, starting this Fall. Of course, they’re going to start printing that book three times a month, so don’t think that they’re turning off the spigot on the money faucet.

But that news isn’t even the kicker. Remember that disruptive, disorienting, and disheartening image of the new Captain America with a gun? Well… in the teaser image that’s been released for the impending Spider-Man “event,” guess who’s got a gun now?

I’ve got a suggestion for a new corporate tagline: Marvel Comics – One-Trick Pony and Harbinger of Doom.